Reliable metering of commercial service mashups
Christian Zirpins, Elmar Jakobs, Volker Kuttruff · 2011
On the Web, mashups have emerged as a promising approach to aggregate Web-based resources and services in an effortless way that allows for situational composition of software applications and in some cases even empowers end-users to do so. In this paper, we focus on commercial mashups as a means to implement customized service bundles in multi-level software service marketplaces and discuss problems that challenge reliable provision, aggregation and consumption of mashed-up services requiring payment. In particular, we propose a pragmatic method for service metering that considers the conflicting expectations from providers of mashed up services and consumers of service mashups in case of failures during REST-based service interactions over the Web. Our method builds on a relaxed version of the Try Confirm/Cancel protocol for transactional control. Our discussion builds on experiences gained in the COCKTAIL project that aims at a holistic platform for commercial service mashups. This platform provides the basis for a prototypical implementation of our metering approach.